Archive for the 'Potpourri' Category

Certainly it’s much less expensive to offshore your manufacturing to Asia, but some US businesses have said, “Enough!” due to quality problems, production delays, intellectual property concerns, and the large lead time from prototype approval to delivery. These businesses have returned to domestic manufacturing sources. Note that this situation mainly applies to small businesses with relatively low manufacturing volumes—apparently the Asian companies don’t consider them important enough to worry about. But it’s not just small companies. The linked article also explains how Chinese wages are not as low as they used to be, and that offshoring, which used to be a no-brainer, is not necessarily the best business decision to make.

Comic strip writers David Waisglass and Gordon Coulthart have hit upon the true limiting factor of computer technology: PEBCAK. This ranks up there with placing USER=ID-10-T in the config.sys file. See the linked article for the actual comic strip.

Long-time Chad’s News readers will recall this post, where we learned that a dog’s tongue bends down instead of up when drinking water. If that wasn’t weird enough, the linked article explains how a cat drinks—turns out that its tongue doesn’t even penetrate the surface of the water.

The author of the linked article is a man who writes customized academic papers for pay. He’s practically a machine when it comes to researching a topic and pounding out the paper, and his work runs the gamut from English 101 to graduate theses. I know that cheating happens, but what surprised me the most is how blatant it is. The article is lengthy but well worth the time spent.

A professor at a Swedish university had his laptop stolen. It contained 10 years of academic work, which he had not backed up. But disaster was averted when the considerate thief dumped all the data to a USB drive and mailed it to the professor. The man should purchase a lottery ticket, with luck like that.

Eight people crammed into an extended-cab pickup, none of whom were wearing seat belts, and with at least one person in the bed of the truck. Driver lost control and rolled the truck. All eight passengers were ejected—two died, two were in serious condition, and the remaining four were all hospitalized. Sigh…. There should be a Darwin Award in there somewhere.

In Obion County, Tennessee, residents must pay a $75 yearly fee to receive firefighting services from the city of South Fulton. Homeowner Gene Cranick decided not to make the payment, and then his house caught on fire. The firefighters refused to respond until the fire began to threaten a neighboring house where the owner had paid the fee. Even then, they did nothing in regards to Cranick’s house and let it burn down. Cranick offered to cover whatever it would cost to put out the fire, but the officials refused.

There’s been quite a bit of outrage over this, but I’ve come down on the side of the the city officials. What do you think?

While money can’t buy happiness, lack of money can definitely cause unhappiness. Researchers Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman have determined that the cutoff point above which more money doesn’t matter for day-to-day happiness is a salary of $75,000 per year.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, a thief or group of thieves stole $10 million in fraudulent credit card charges over four years by keeping the thefts small (less than $10), spreading them among more than a million cardholders, and never charging the same person more than once. Many cardholders didn’t even notice the charges, but there were enough complaints that the FTC finally took action and filed suit—although they don’t actually know who’s responsible for the thefts.